The Loves of Kafka

Love of great literature is one of the outstanding features of South American culture. This Argentine drama, mixes imagination and reality and includes a film-within-a-film story about making a film about Kafka. The writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born to a German Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. In an uncanny way which prefigured the Holocaust, Kafka wrote about absurd, terrifying situations taking place in a nihilistic universe in which almost everyone can be considered a victim. The movie explores his romantic and intellectual life before he died at age 41 of tuberculosis. Sigmund Freud, whom Kafka never actually met, makes an appearance in the story. The film-within-a-film has an Argentine movie director travel to Prague to try and produce a film there about Kafka's loves, only to discover that the studio there is busy filming Amadeus. Though these elements are confusing to read about, some reviewers felt that the director somehow made a coherent and enjoyable film out of them.